Streamlined CRM Solution Pays Off

In the CRM space, integrator and consultant Watch Hill Partners has centered its attention on just that: fine-tuning existing solutions to enhance customers' business processes.

Last November, Fleet Bank approached the company, based here, to help it make the most of a CRM system in which the bank had invested a substantial amount of time and money. Dollar for dollar, the solution Watch Hill deployed turned out to be one of its best, said Seth Henry, vice president of CRM operations at the integrator. "You see a ton of very big initiatives in the CRM space," Henry said. "But this was a relatively small project with a really huge impact because it finally leveraged all the work the customer has done to date."

Fleet's goal was to use that CRM infrastructure to streamline its account-planning process,an annual ritual by which the bank pores over its commercial and corporate accounts, decides on a product portfolio and identifies cross-selling opportunities.

"We had a successful process already in place," said Chris Horgan, senior vice president at Fleet. "But we wanted the technology to facilitate that process because the way we were doing it was difficult."

The bank was using a series of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and a process that involved many people, lots of paperwork and little automation. Reports were generated monthly by querying the CRM database manually and building reports by hand.

But Fleet's primary application was Siebel's Vista, so Watch Hill dispatched a project team to configure the CRM software product so it would tie in with the bank's proprietary account-planning system. "Once you customize Siebel, it becomes very hard to upgrade and maintain, so we avoided doing that," Henry said. "Instead, we had to adapt Siebel to do what Fleet wanted and [to work with the processes that Fleet already had in place."

Watch Hill had about two months to get the job done so Fleet could begin its account planning in early February this year. The integrator's experience in the financial services sector, coupled with its expertise integrating CRM infrastructures with legacy back-end systems, helped it complete the project successfully and in a timely fashion, Henry said.

While it's difficult to quantify the benefits of the solution at this early stage, cross-sell results from the corporate commercial bank are up as much as 15 percent, Horgan said. "It's been very successful so far, and while the scale of the project may not be as large as what Watch Hill has done in the past, it's still big," he said. "In this [economic climate, the projects that are going to get funded are the ones that have a direct link to the revenue-generating process."

Now managers can complete account plans in a central application, in less time and with less room for error, Horgan said. And because the account planning system is now tied to the CRM application, bank staffers can track actual revenue vs. forecasted revenue in realtime.

Also, now that data exists in a single repository, reporting has been simplified drastically and reports can be generated on a monthly basis.

In addition, Fleet is getting more out of the Siebel application than ever before, having discovered features of the software that staffers were unaware of prior to Watch Hill's engagement, Henry said.

"The great thing is that we consolidated instead of added, and that's a very foreign concept in the IT world these days," Henry said. "It shows foresight on Fleet's part. They let a successful business process drive the application, not the other way around."